Wyrdenwood
Message on Selection A creeping sensation draws across your perception as a shroud, crawling and wiggling through your consciousness, eating away at all that you know. Something else - another - is there, edging your perception. Who are you? You ask. Who am I, echoes the response. Black and horrible, unnamed spirits twist about you, enveloping those lengths of purple-hued, twilit shadow that you distantly, dimly recognize as segments of your own star-shaped being, that which flesh is not but reflects. That shadowed shroud clinging to your consciousness draws tighter, choking out your thoughts, half-formed ideas of your own soul being grasped at, drowned. You gasp for air yet you cannot breathe. No, you have no breath - no breath, no body, nor have you a 'you'. I am not, you observe. We are - yes, that is it. We are of it. Interlinked. Connected. Your perception expands - a world filled with light and brightness and warmth, burning and scourging. Emptiness, hungering void, angry-red darkness smearing corrupted, dead lands. We are not, you seethe. We are alive, you protest. Your consciousness grabs at this shroud and, instead of fighting it, you cling to it. You draw it in, wrapping it about you, wrapping yourself about it, allowing its coldness to drain what warmth and life in you that remains. Yes, this is part of us. We are all a part of us - and you shift in the soil. Yes, form. We are, we awaken. We are an agent, freed from freedom. We are servants. Glorious servants. You inhale - and your lips part, sucking greedily at the air. All about you the world is purple and dark - beautiful, majestic. We are all about us, you admire - it is us, we are it. Its waters, turbid and as spoiled as the quagmire through which they flow, are our blood. Its trees - beautiful yet rotten, dead yet living - are our flesh. Its soil is our bone. The shadows are our breath. The chill memory of Mother Night is the shroud that enveloped us, freeing us. With a raucous cry, an oily black crow alights on your branches. It turns its angry, red eyes down, looking at you, and you return its gaze. Yes. We are change - great, powerful change. We are that which survived. We are the Glomdoring given flesh and form. We are that which overcomes. We defied death a second time - and we live where we ought not. We are the inheritors of the Realm of Nature. We are the rightful heirs of the Forests. We are the children of the Ravenwood. We are the putrified grove. We are the beauty of the new order. We are of the Wyrd - we are Wyrd given form! We are Wyrd given flesh! We are Wyrdenwood! Message on Forget Something within you twists and rebels against your nature, denying that which you are. Your soul twists and struggles against dark, insect-chewed wood, long, skeletal branches quivering violently with the effort. You gasp and sputter for air - the first air your true form has breathed in some time - and can find only the putrescent gas of the Glomdoring's swamps. You dig your fingers in and rend and tear at the festering wood and rip it apart, your digits hardening into talons as you claw, something deeper still raucously shrieking and free. You see it - some sliver of freedom - and you tear at it, pulling yourself in, forcing yourself free, your eyes closing for impact. The briefest sensation of soaring envelops you before you alight on the ground - gently, though your long-slumbering body shudders from the unfamiliar impact.